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Last year the banners at the Moscone West conference center went up on the Sunday before WWDC. This year Apple is getting a head start and already started decorating on Tuesday the week before the big event.

It’s a patchwork of app icons accompanied by the slogan: “Where great ideas go on to do great things”.

There is one thing that you can only get in Cupertino: Clothing and merchandise with an Apple logo. With Apple being my favorite brand is probably quite understandable that will want to be wearing the bitten Apple whenever I can… as opposed to Nike which I prefer over other sports brands.

With Nike I like the simplicity of the Swoosh, that only gets beaten bit the Apple because Apple because of the simple fact that I owe my livelihood to the company from Cupertino.

Being in San Francisco naturally triggers the “Pilgrimage Syndrome” where people – similar to birds – seem to need to migrate South to settle at the Apple Company Store in Cupertino to fill the need for spending money on the mentioned merchandise.

When traveling to the US for WWDC I learned that I need a few days to adjust my sleeping cycle so I added the week before the – then rumored – date to my itinerary. This provides me with some opportunities to scout ahead, meet local developers and catch up on the Movies.

Everybody is shortening URLs these days. While this saves spaces in Tweets it has several disadvantages for the user: you don’t see the domain that this link refers to. And you know that for certain clicks on the short URL are recorded and data-mined. Just have a look at my public bit.ly timeline. I check there often … pure vanity.

You might remember my hobby project Tweet Curator which allows the filtering of tweets that have certain domains. Now the next extension of this concept would be to also expand those pesky short URLs and use the referred domains for blocking too. There is NO hiding any more!

You probably have seen it hundreds of times, it’s become so natural to you that you probably don’t consciously notice it any more. I’m speaking of the bouncing of icons on the dock in OS X. The method how those pesky little critters (aka “Icons”) try to win your attention. Me! Me! ME!

This animation is probably the one you see the most in your day-to-day business working on code on a Mac. Yet I have never seen anybody using it in an iOS app. Why? It’s not that this animation is the sort of Clippy that everybody hopes to forget about some day. It’s something that well established and we know what it means.

When I asked around (on Twitter) and looked around (on Google) was only found a couple of “spring loaded” formulas, but nothing concrete that would enable me to get this animation added to my app. So I researched it and now I’m happy to present to you … 3 Methods of bouncing.

I get so fed up with how YouTube mangles the screen recordings of QuickTime that I purchased Screenflow. I wanted to show off my specialized Twitter search tool that I’m working on besides of my regular projects. A “Hobby” if you will.

I would very much appreciate if you would take a few minutes to watch it and then let me hear your thoughts. If you have some ideas for improvements then don’t hesitate to let me know.

Linguan 1.1 brings the long-awaited support for localizing XIB files. While it has proven a boon for iOS developers where you generally can easily set the UI strings from code, Mac developers where left in the rain because there you typically have way more strings in the XIB files making it impractical to localize everything in code.

For the immediate first version we are remote-controlling ibtool which needs to be installed with the Xcode Commanline Tools and the path properly set up.

A while ago Austrian development company Antiloop approached me. They needed to have custom list prefixes in DTCoreText as the default bullets didn’t cut it for their purpose. They had sponsored new features for DTCoreText in the past, a shining example of a company that is willing to invest in the Open Source technologies they use.

There is no provision in CSS to achieve this directly, but a well known workaround exists using the li:before pseudo-selector together with a content attribute and list-style:none. This omits the list prefix, but substitutes the contents of content.

To get the unicode double chevrons right (U+00BB) you would specify this style:

ul {list-style-type:none;}
li:before {content:"\00bb ";}

Note the use of the non-standard -webkit-padding-start which specifies the left padding for lists in Safari. The content attribute apparently is containing unicode sequences with a single back slash.